The Matrix Is a Documentary: Riz Virk on the Simulation Hypothesis - #516

Get my new book Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner for just 99 cents while the sale lasts: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 What if your life wasn’t real—not metaphorically, but literally? That’s the premise my guest today has been exploring for years. Rizwan Virk, MIT graduate, gaming entrepreneur, and author of The Simulation Hypothesis, believes that physics, computing, and even ancient wisdom traditions point to the same unsettling conclusion: we may be living inside a programmed reality. In this conversation, we dive into the science, philosophy, and technical roadmaps that could one day prove—or disprove—this theory. We explore quantum mechanics, AI, and the limits of spacetime itself, asking whether reality is an unshakable foundation… or just a beautifully rendered illusion. Key Takeaways: 00:00 Intro 00:00:42 The Simulation Hypothesis 00:10:14 The limitations of AGI 00:15:17 Rizwan’s religious background 00:21:43 Energetic physical limitations in a simulation 00:28:33 Quantum computing and the simulation hypothesis 00:34:45 Judging a book by its cover 00:37:11 The Planck length 00:41:59 Is Deja Vu a consequence of the simulation? 00:43:41 Ethical and moral considerations 00:48:35 How to avoid collapsing the wave function 00:54:33 Cracks in the matrix 01:02:21 What’s the purpose of the simulation? 01:07:28 Rizwan’s next project 01:09:02 The winning strategy 01:10:37 Outro — Additional resources: ➡️ Follow Rizwan Virk: ✖️ Twitter: https://x.com/rizstanford?lang=en ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/ 🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Brian Keating?

  Do we live in a simulation? Today's guest claims there's powerful evidence that we live in a simulation. But why?

• 0:06Speaker 01

  I became intrigued by this idea that there was a whole world inside the computer. And originally, you know, with the text adventures, we were visualizing it in our heads. But then with graphic adventures, we were suddenly able to see this world. But I always wondered what was beyond the boundaries and what could be seen.

• 0:21Brian Keating?

  But is there really evidence that we live in a simulation?

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Our reality is not actually physical like this table. It's actually a virtual reality.

• 0:30Brian Keating?

  Today's guest, Dr. Rizwan Virk, explains exactly why he thinks it's more likely than not that our whole existence is a mere manifestation of a master simulation taking place in the universe. Let's go. Thank you so much for coming on.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Great to be here.

• 0:45Brian Keating?

  We'll go through the book and take everybody on a journey. First of all, I want to present you with the Keating Medal for Impossible Imagination. There it goes, with a picture of Arthur C. Clarke, and he plays a role in this book. Minor role, but a role nonetheless. And of course, you've been to his house unlike me. What was that experience like when you went there? Were there monoliths like this little beauty over there?

• 1:04Speaker 01

  There were a lot of pictures of monoliths. And there were, you know, pictures of him with David Prowse from Darth, who played Darth Vader. Pictures of Arthur C. Clarke with, you know, the moon landing astronauts. It was really interesting because they preserved his office. And generally speaking, it's not supposed to be open to the public. But any foreigner who goes there and slips a few rupees to the security guard will take you up. And, you know, he's got all of his books there. And, you know, plays a minor role in my book because it was during that visit when I was looking at behind his desk, I saw many of my favorite books from when I was growing up, like 2001, A Space Odyssey, 2010, Odyssey 2. And I saw all these different translations.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  And I had one of those moments that we sometimes have when we get inspired. And I had wanted to be a writer for a while. And I just had this intuition that it was time for me to get busy on the writing side because I'd been spending all my time in Silicon Valley, first as an entrepreneur, then later as an investor. And it was during that time that I wrote the article about why I think we live inside a video game that led to. This book eventually.

• 2:11Brian Keating?

  I noticed in this book, reading it, that there was this connection between something that happened in my childhood, which might have had an impact on my career. And it was the video game Adventure, which featured a virtual world. But more than that, it featured the very first real Easter egg, as far as I understand it. So Easter egg being a hidden message encoded and encrypted, which if you took this magic zero dimensional pixel and you transported it left, left, right, right, up, down, side, side, back, back, diagonal and up, you'd come to a secret chamber. And then if you move the joystick to just the right position, you would drop the pixel and you would enter this, this room where there'd be some flashing lights. I mean, a room. It was

• 2:52Brian Keating?

  a square with a dot and the zero dimensional pixel unlocked this, this message, which came from the designer Warren Robinette. And it said, created by Warren Robinette. That's basically it. For 1981 or whatever I was, it was amazing that I had unleashed and unlocked the evidence, proof positive that this was living in a simulation. Tell me why you think that we are of greater odds than not that we live in a simulation.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Well,

• 3:19Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  If you think of the simulation hypothesis, and I think, you know, we, we share a history there in terms of having played video games on the Atari computer, which is, you know, where Adventure was. But before that, there were text adventure games. And I became intrigued by this idea that there was a whole world inside the computer. And originally, you know, with the text adventures, we were visualizing it in our heads. But then with graphic adventures, we were suddenly able to see this world. But I always wondered what was beyond the boundaries and what could be seen. So for example, there was a racing game called Pole Position. And I used to wonder, well, what's beyond the racetrack? You'd see a mountain that looks like Mount Fuji. You see some bleachers with some fake people. I mean, they weren't really people. They were like a few pixels, right? But I'd always wonder what was beyond the mountain, what happens to those people when I'm not logged in, et cetera.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  And so that kind of inspired me later when I became a video game designer to really start thinking about this. So the simulation hypothesis, if you were to define it, I like to say it's the idea that our reality is not actually physical like this table. It's actually a virtual reality like that depicted in the film The Matrix. But I also like to think of it as a series of propositions. And you can agree with some of those propositions, but I think they kind of follow logically one to the other. So the first is that the world is not actually physical, but that it consists of information or bits of information. The second is that that information is getting computed all the time. And the third is somehow that information is rendered for us.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  And it appears as if, you know, this microphone is a physical object. And then, you know, the last proposition is that this is all some kind of purposeful hooks. Now, different people have different opinions on each of those and, but I like to lay it out that way. Because then you can discuss the different parts of what makes up the simulation hypothesis. I see it as an axis where on one end of the axis, it's really just a metaphor where the video game is a metaphor for something very complex called reality. At the other end of the axis, we take it very literally and say, the world is literally a computer simulation running on some type of advanced computer, probably way more advanced than what we've been able to think of thus far. And so the book tries to explore it from all of these different angles.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  That's why I touch on religion, philosophy, video games, quantum physics, et cetera. And some people in the scientific world give me a hard time for spending time on the religious side, for example. But I like to show that they were using metaphors in the past and this is a new type of metaphor that makes more sense, a techno-scientific metaphor.

• 6:14Brian Keating?

  Yeah, and my conversations with Nick Bostrom, a few times he's been on the podcast. I mean, he's candidly admitted that, you know, there's nothing really that could be used to differentiate either the existence of the multiverse from the falsification of that proposition. And we'll talk about how scientifically we could. Prove or at least emphasize the evidence for the simulation hypothesis, but but also that it does connect to prospects and propositions regarding teleology. And why the would it be the purpose of such a thing, which naturally then invokes questions like the simulator, you know, he or she or it or they. What are some of the tangible, physical advances that have led you to believe there's more preponderance of evidence for the simulation hypothesis than not?

• 6:57Brian Keating?

  What is it coming from AI advances, game advances? Is it coming from quantum computing that we explored in my laboratory earlier today? What what what is most kind of convincing to you just just at a basic level?

• 7:10Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  Well, I think at a basic level, it's all of those things happening in parallel. And I often tell the story that after I sold my last video game company, I was visiting a startup in Marin County, which is across the bay from San Francisco. And I put on a virtual reality headset and I was playing a VR ping pong game. And back then, the VR headsets were much bulkier than they are now. There were literally wires coming from the ceiling. So you knew you were in a virtual reality and the graphics were terrible on the ping pong game, but the physics engine of the game was so good. The responsiveness was so accurate that it actually felt like I was hitting a real ball with a real paddle, so much so that at the end of the game, I tried to put the paddle down on the table instinctively and I tried to lean against the table. Of course, there was no table, so the paddle fell to the floor. I almost fell over.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  And then I began to really wonder, how long would it take us as a civilization, as a technological civilization to create something like the Matrix? And so that's really what led me down that rabbit hole. But I think the fact that video games are becoming more and more realistic. If you've seen, I mean, sometimes I'll show a slide, which will show racing games starting with eight bit. And then show 16 bit racing games from the era of Nintendo, which was in the late eighties, and then show a 32 bit or a 64 bit racing game. There was a Matrix film, a fourth Matrix film that came out a couple of years ago, back in 21. And at the same time, Epic, which makes the Epic Engine, which is one of the, the Unreal Engine, which is one of the top engines for video game development. They released a demo called The Matrix Awakens, and it wasn't a full game,

• 9:04Speaker 01

  but the city in that game looked like it could have been. It was a mix of Berlin, San Francisco, but it could have been a real city. I mean, it was really hard to distinguish. The characters still weren't quite there yet, but now with the advance of AI, particularly with L L Ms and AI having passed. Most people think that chatbots have kind of passed the Turing test. In fact, in the book, I introduced this idea, the metaverse Turing test, which is, we can talk about later. But the idea that AI is getting good enough for us to have conversations and relationships with it. I mean, there are people out there who have AI boyfriends and girlfriends and, you know, I had been interested in this for a while because of my interest in virtual reality and my background in video gaming. And then a couple, a couple of years ago, I was in Cambridge in the UK. And this is the first time I, I had heard of this in the wild,

• 9:49Speaker 01

  where, meeting a friend of mine, she said, oh, her friend just broke up with her boyfriend. And so she got a replica boyfriend for a little while until she got a real one. And so that was the first time I really just heard about it, not within the computer industry, not within the video game industry. And that's when I realized, though, this is actually much broader than had been. So this idea that we would not be able to distinguish, both in terms of the graphics, but also in terms of the AI characters. I think all of that is lending more credibility to this idea that we could be in a simulation.

• 10:20Speaker 03

  Hey, everybody. I'm usually the one that asks my guests to judge their books by their covers. But today I'm asking myself to judge my own book by its cover. My newest book, Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, is chock full of advice, life tips, and focus and productivity tips from nine of the world's greatest minds, Nobel laureates ranging from economics to peace to physics, of course. It launches September 9th, which is also my birthday.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  I will go check it out and my publisher's gotten Amazon to run a special just for listeners of the Into the Impossible podcast. You can get the Kindle edition for only 99 cents. That plus than a new pocket protector. So go to Amazon and get the Kindle copy today because this special only lasts for the first week after launch.

• 11:06Brian Keating?

  Let's talk about some of the physics implications of the existence of a simulation. Let's talk about hardware versus software. So software, you quote, you know, Marc Andreessen in the book is, you know, eating the world. You know, I feel like LLMs are eating software because now you can basically have an infinite army of coders making any software application you want instantaneously. So the price of software is going basically to zero. But hardware, the physical world of monoliths and metals and things like that is much slower. And I'm an experimental physicist and it's much harder to make, as you saw the lab, the experimental 3D printed objects that we have to make to render those than to make a theory which may never be testable, like this simulation about this, or the multiverse for that matter, which another topic you've written about. So let's talk about the limitations. Where

• 11:51Brian Keating?

  are the limitations coming from? It seems to me impossible to think that they'll come from software. And yet I don't believe that AGI is upon us. I don't think we're any closer to it. I think it's, as I said recently, you know, it's 10 years away and it always will be. But tell us, what are the limitations you see them?

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, you know, I use the Marc Andreessen's quote about software is eating the world. And I say, information is eating the other sciences in that, you know, if you talk to a PhD in physics or chemistry, most of their time is probably spent on the computer. And more and more, we're seeing even with biology, what we're really talking about are the DNA sequences, which and the genomes, which were, you know, first posited by John von Neumann. So you've got this idea that information science may in fact underlie all of the other sciences. And then even within physics, there's this idea of digital physics, right? Whereas, you know, when I was a kid, we were talking about conservation of momentum, conservation of energy. And now physicists are talking about conservation of information and does information get created or destroyed?

• 12:51Speaker 01

  So there's a whole set of issues around the science. That I think lends credibility to this subject. That said, I think I agree with you that we're not at AGI yet. And I think part of the reason why is that if you think of science fiction, AI is often presented as a discrete entity, if you will, like data in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Or how. Or how in 2001. But the AI we have today is more like the computer in Star Trek: The Next Generation, where you're just asking at things and it's giving you information. And so there's this, there's this divide between a separate entity that's self-contained and kind of this synchronized AI that knows everything and is constantly updating itself.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  If you've ever watched the Dune movies or read the original Dune book, there, there's a whole set of prequels. And in the prequels, humanity is enslaved by AI. And it's something that is a very popular trope in science fiction. Personally, I don't think we have to worry about that. But the reason I bring it up is there's an interesting element where Omnias, which was the AI, was basically it would learn all the time and had many copies of itself. So it was a synchronized AI. I literally called it the synchronized empire when it was ruling the humans. But then one robot decided it wanted to be separate from Omnias. And, and so it was non-synchronized. I think the name was Erasmus or something. But because that robot would learn through its own experiences and stuff. And I think we're missing that a bit with today's AI.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  And so I think embodiment and exploring the virtual world may be one of the reasons to get there. So I do think there are some limitations around AI that may come up. That said.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Computer science is often about optimization. And so even when we talk about the number of particles in the universe, will we ever be able to simulate that many particles? There's a lot of optimization that can be done so that we may or may not need to. So, so I, I, I do think those, those are some areas. Now, our hardware today, sure. I mean, when I talk about the universe being a computer, we're not talking about a 386 or a, you know, today's Nvidia's GPU.

• 15:21Brian Keating?

  Atari 2600.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Atari 2600, right. So back in the eighties, if you were to say, hey, can you create a whole world like World of Warcraft? That has 3D pixels or Fortnite? We'd say, no, you can't. This is way too many pixels to keep track of. And so what happened between then and now is that 3D modeling became popular and better techniques were developed. And so now we only have to keep track of certain pixels. And so that's a key part of why I think you can't always draw straight line comparisons and say, well, this won't work in the future. There was a great case study for Intel where they kept trying to make their processors smaller or actually more like fit more transistors. And it was in like the 2000s. And they said, look, if we keep going at this rate,

• 16:07Speaker 01

  our microprocessors will get hotter than the sun. Okay. So which meant that Moore's law would end, but it didn't. And the part of the reason why is they changed the algorithms, right? So they became more efficient and they began to use what were called mobile processors at the time, which use less energy, but they also had reduced instruction sets on those. So, so, so, so that's where I think, you know, yes, there will be limitations in our ability to produce this, but they may also be overcome with new, new types of algorithms and new optimization.

• 16:34Brian Keating?

  Before we get to the questions that, you know, I think my audience will be really interested in in terms of the quantum mechanical overlay on top of all of this, including wave function collapse, double slit experiments and retrocausality, things you all discuss in the book. I do want to pay at least a little bit of, well, not lip service, but I do want to at least mention the fact that you're one of the few that's unafraid really to confront the possibility of, you know, what religious texts could give to science that perhaps scientists are overlooking. So let's talk a little bit about your background. I don't think you've mentioned it much on, on many of the podcasts I've seen you on. What sort of is your background in terms of faith? And how does it influence what physicists, computer scientists may be getting wrong? And ways to get us out of a rut that we may seemingly be in, at least towards getting

• 17:19Brian Keating?

  to AGI?

• 17:20Speaker 01

  So my background is, you know, my parents are from Pakistan. I was actually born there and then I moved to the US and grew up in Detroit, in Michigan. So I grew up in a Muslim household. I was never particularly religious. But then, you know, as I went to college, I started to spend more time exploring some of the eastern faiths around Buddhism and Hinduism, particularly the esoteric aspects, the yogic philosophy of the eastern religions. And then later I began to explore more of the Sufi traditions, which is the mystical tradition in Islam. And so I think whenever you grow up in a culture where your religion is not the dominant religion, you start to look at things a little bit differently. And you start to say, okay, well, what's in common between these different religions?

• 18:03Speaker 01

  So of course, you know, we knew the stories of the Bible growing up, partly because they are there, the Islamic traditions, but also just because the culture has, you know, the 10 commandments. Like, all of this stuff is out there. And so I started to look at what's in common and what may be different. And I'm not afraid to talk about this idea because I think that if you think of religions, how do they start?

• 18:27Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  They usually start because someone, say the founder of a religion, has what religious scholars like to call a theophany. Like somehow the divine breaks through into the physical world. Now, that could be a burning bush that's talking to Moses, that could be angel that appears to Muhammad in a cave while he's fasting near Mecca in the desert, or...

• 19:13Speaker 01

  It's through a series of techniques, you have mystic, who is then trying to explore beyond the physical world. So the yogic techniques, Siddhartha, on the Buddhist side, you also have shamanic techniques. And of course, now we're learning more about psychedelics as a way to potentially perceive more than what's physical. But i- if you think of Plato's cave and Plato's allegory of the cave, most people know the general story, which is that you have people that are chained to one side of a cave and what they're seeing is just shadows opposite the mouth. They don't know there's a whole world out there and they're just seeing the shadows. But not that many people outside of philosophy have read the whole allegory. And what happens is that there's a guy, a philosopher, who breaks out, he goes outside. The first thing that happens is he's blinded because there's too much light. They've never seen the sun, they grew up in a cave.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Then he comes back later and he tries to tell people what he saw. And of course, they reject that idea because that's all they know. And so with these religious traditions, they had to describe things that they perceived that were non-physical and might even be ineffable, which is a term that means cannot be put into words, to the general population 2,000 years ago. And so how did they do that? They used metaphors and often they used technological metaphors. For example, the wheel of samsara in Buddhism. Okay, that doesn't mean there's a physical wheel. They're using that metaphor. And even many of the stories about angels and what the function of the angels is, you know, my name, Rizwan, is actually the Islamic name for the equivalent of Saint Peter,

• 20:42Speaker 01

  which would be the angel that sits at the gates of heaven. Now, again, that's a metaphor. That doesn't mean there's one guy who sits there and decides for everybody, you know, whether they get it or not. That is more like a function. And the same is true of many of the minor gods. For example, in the Hindu pantheon, where they have a function. There's something called the recording angels, both in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, where you have angels who are writing down your deeds, your good deeds and your bad deeds. And you have one angel for this, one angel for that. And in Islam, they call it the scroll of deeds. And they say, when you die, you have to read your book and you have to see what you did. Now, that doesn't mean there's a physical book or that there's... You know, a feather pan.

• 21:23Brian Keating?

  Same in Judaism, exactly right.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, but my point is those are technological metaphors, potentially for something that is ontologically real, that was that was perceived by the mystics and then translated. Today, we would say, well, what that really means is that everything is being recorded and you would have to watch, you would have to re-watch a replay of your life. And it turns out, near-death experiencers have reported this. They call it the life review, where they say you have to go through every single event in your life, but from the point of view of other people. So, turns out, in VR, I've done this before, you can take like a World of Warcraft session or a League of Legends session, and there was a startup I was involved with, where you put on the headset and you can go back and re-watch the entire video game from any X, Y, Z coordinate.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  And you could literally see what it was like to shoot yourself. And that's very similar to what near-death experiencers describe with the life review, which not all of them have a life review, but the ones that do have it. And so, I'm not afraid to explore that, to say, well, what if what they saw was something real? I mean, if a thousand people go to China and they tell you similar stories, even though the stories may be different, one might have gone to the mountains, one might have gone to, you know, Shanghai, near the ocean, one might have gone in the south, that there might be something there and they're trying to describe it. And so, for me, it turns out that if you look at the, what the old traditions were saying, including Maya in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, which means illusion, turns out there's a similar metaphor in the Quran, which is el gururi matal,

• 22:53Speaker 01

  which is an enjoyable delusion, which is also represented as a game that we are playing. And so, I look at that and say, well, today's best metaphor for that would be a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, which we are inside, we have a physics engine, we think it's real, but in fact, there is something beyond that. And so, that's why I'm not afraid to get into the religious side. And I get attacked both from, you know,

• 23:19Brian Keating?

  Yeah, from the scientific and from the religious world, right.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Too fundamental on the religious side, although many folks in the religious side actually are very open to this idea.

• 23:27Brian Keating?

  I mean, I find it hard to envision ways that we could develop scientifically falsifiable. You know, hypothesis, even from near death experiences, my friend Michael Shermer's done a lot of work on this and basically asked them for not just the kind of really headline grabbing, you know, I saw a light and I saw my deeds in a book, but you know, who was in the operating room, you know, while you were there? None of them can ever answer that. None of them can ever answer factual questions about the actual, you know, car that hit them or, you know, in the studies that he's done and in terms of replicable scientific double blind, you know, where they couldn't have known unless they really had some way of omniscience, but they do seem to have this tradition. I don't want to argue about that, but you know, people have their own experiences, but, but you know, we hear, you know, really trying to look at the scientific basis for, for

• 24:12Brian Keating?

  these things where the religious side of things can give a little bit of color, maybe the spice, which makes things very much enjoyable. And I think they do share commonalities, we were talking before we hit record, you know, and basically the, the, the notion of a purpose and, and why, why we exist at all. And if we do exist and if the simulation is correct, and you know, some people go on the spectrum, you give different possibilities ranging from, you know, Nick Bostrom to, you know, maybe me, a little bit more of a skeptic, you know, from a hundred percent to zero, you know, 99.99, you know, the infinite number nine, down to, you know, zero, zero, zero point one, uh, the question or zero point zero, the question is what scientifically can we glean about the simulator,

• 24:54Brian Keating?

  the simulation itself? So here's why I want to pivot to the physics kind of engine side. You already brought that up thankfully. And that's that, you know, as you point out, simulators, video game designers are really smart, the guys and gals, right? So they're not going to waste time, you know, simulating stuff that is never going to be seen or can't be accessed, right? That's one thing they won't do. Or something that you'd need to get to, you know, one out of, you know, level 256 on Pac-Man allegedly does not exist, right? Cause it was a 200, it would be 257 levels and they only had about eight bits or something like that. So this, it only goes up that high. So they, they're smart. They conserve like a spider doesn't, you know, it could catch every fly if its spider web was a complete solid disc, right? Like your metal, the keating metal, right? If it looked like that, it would catch every single fly. But no, no, no, it's going to

• 25:36Brian Keating?

  try to catch flies of a certain size. So the web spacing only has to be so much. So it conserves its biological energies. So what sorts of inclinations or indications might we get as to the purpose of the simulation? The the attributes of the simulator from basic physics? So let's start there. One thing you mentioned, and you do a great job of, is describing, you know, what we call pixels or voxels and the rendering engines that take place now. And how they don't render, as I said, every single, you know, minute of every single life that could exist in whatever games you guys like to play. I don't actually play many games. I do flight simulators, but even in flight simulators, they don't render like Nebraska when you're trying to land the Concorde or fly the Concorde underneath the Eiffel Tower, which is very hard to do.

• 26:17Brian Keating?

  But you can do it. So they're not going to render everything all the time because this costs a lot of money, costs a lot of time, costs a lot of energy. So what what sorts of energetic, physical limitations would there be in the simulation?

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a good point. And you brought up this idea of conservation and optimization, which is something that I talk a lot about in the book. And, you know, I will say I'm not a physicist, so I tend to rely on physicists' interpretations of quantum mechanics and particularly of quantum indeterminacy and the observer effect. But to me, the collapse of the probability wave, if we take that interpretation for a moment, of course, you know, people have their own interpretations that they prefer, the multiverse interpretation, which I also think makes more sense in a simulated world. But if we start with the collapse, to me, that that sounded like very much how we build video games. And we only render the parts that can be observed by your avatar.

• 27:10Brian Keating?

  It's a compression algorithm. It's basically compression.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  Basically a compression algorithm. And it seemed to me that what we're finding is that the universe gets rendered as needed. Now, you can argue whether that's as an observer, or it's via a measurement or an interaction. But to me, the golden rule is sort of render only that which is needed. And in computer science, we have this idea of lazy evaluation. And, you know, lazy evaluation is such that, suppose you have a little expression that says x equals, you know, two to the power or whatever, two to the fourth power, sixteen. But you you don't use computing resources to calculate the value of x until x is needed, because if x is not in the computer program.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Why bother? And you know, when I was at MIT and I hadn't thought about this in a little while, I work with a guy named Greg Papadopoulos, who later went on to become the CTO of Sun Microsystems. And he was doing research on something called finely grained parallelism with parallel computers. This is back in the 90s, right? So today, you know, we have computers that have multiple CPUs, multiple GPUs. But back then, for the most part, every computer just had a single one. What his research was doing was it would break down an algorithm or even a set of code, and it would break it into parts and figure out which parts could be run in parallel and which parts were happening together. And so to me, even if you have multiple observers, all requiring collapses of probability waves that need to be kept consistent,

• 28:33Speaker 01

  that's pretty much how we do video games. So on the server, we send out information and we get information back. And now we happen to be doing this in person quote, but if we were doing this on Zoom, we wouldn't really be talking to each other, right? I would be talking to my computer and then you would be talking to your computer and it would play back. And so, you know, where I was going with that was just this model of having to synchronize multiple individual players to basically ensure consistency reminded me a lot of this idea of how do you have a collapse of the wave? Can you have multiple collapses of the wave and the Wigner's Friend thought experiment?

• 29:09Brian Keating?

  Entangled, right.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and entanglement as well. So those were ways in which I really started to think through the quantum aspects, but also with qubits and quantum computing and the idea that a qubit can be in multiple positions. It can be in superposition. And to me, as a computer scientist, that's really interesting. In fact, recently, we were chatting a little bit about this before. We did a screening of The Matrix at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Boston. And this woman came up and introduced herself to me and she bought three copies of my book and she said she was the wife of Ed Fredkin. Her name was Joyce Fredkin. And Ed Fredkin was one of the first computer scientists. He was at MIT. And he was an MIT professor without having a PhD, which is pretty impressive. But he was exploring cellular phenomena, cellular automata back in the 1950s.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  He invented the Fredkin gate, which is a reversible gate. But just as importantly, he went out to Caltech where Feynman was. And Feynman taught him about physics. And he taught Feynman about computers and then Feynman came out with this talk that led to this idea of building quantum computers. And so you start to see the intersection with digital physics between computation and the physical universe. And I thought that was really interesting as well.

• 30:17Brian Keating?

  In terms of quantum computing, I like to bring out this, you know, kind of cudgel against my friends that do it, which is that quantum computers are some of the best known and even imaginable devices for simulating the properties of quantum computers. It's kind of like string theory. String theory is like the best possible instantiation of the mathematics needed to understand string theory. I mean, these are devices that they're they're sort of, you know, answers without a question yet. Yes, they can do things in terms of cryptography and that that is well known and that was even envisioned by by Feynman. But his main kind of championing of quantum computers was to solve what are called Lagrangians and basically the energy distribution, how energy flows throughout a quantum system, which is basically an atom, atomic systems that get perturbed

• 30:59Brian Keating?

  by external forces, magnetic field, photons, et cetera, like that, right? So they're very good at doing that. It's not clear they're good at doing anything else. I mean, again, sort of analogous to string theory. String theory is very good at this kind of multi-dimensional thing, but we have no inkling that we live in a 10 dimensional, 11 dimensional universe, right? So it's it solves a particular type of problem, but it may be completely irrelevant and therefore it's very interesting math. Now, I'm not saying they're useless. As you know, I'm building one here, so I have to talk my own book, but I have to be honest too, as a scientist and say, look, these things, you know, are often tossed about as, you know, solutions to everything, just like AI and AGI. There's no inkling that they can do any of the things that they're being proposed to do, not just in your book, but but in in, you know, other kind of hyped up analogies.

• 31:43Brian Keating?

  Again, this is really bad for my bottom line because I am going to hopefully commercialize with some friends. But but tell me, Rez, what are the actual hardcore necessities or the necessity of a quantum computer as it applies to the simulation? Because if it's if it's really dependent on, you know, quantum computers, then it would seem to be almost a letdown for me because because quantum computers, we know a lot about them, even though we haven't really built very advanced ones. So I'm sorry to make it so long-winded, but what is or are the different applications of quantum computing? Is it a necessary thing? Is it a sufficient thing for the simulation hypothesis? Where does it where do they come in in your in your mindset towards the simulator, getting to the simulation point?

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Well, it's a good point, but I would add one word to what you said, which is the word yet.

• 32:26Brian Keating?

  Yet.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  In that quantum computing may not be that practical yet. And what we find with technology development, or useful, practical or useful. What we find with technology development is we can't always predict exactly what the use cases will end up being. So when Intel invented the first microprocessor, the 4004, they thought the only usage they could think of for it was for control systems in factories. And they thought maybe they would sell a few thousand and that's it. And of course, today, microprocessors are the, you know, basically the infrastructure of the information age. And we have millions, if not billions.

• 33:01Brian Keating?

  Right, but just to push back with respect, we had vacuum tube, we had human computers, we had slide rules, we had analog computers. So it wasn't like it was an ab initio, new thing, you know, where we didn't have computing. And then all of a sudden we had computing. It wasn't like going from an abacus to a quantum computer. So yes, it's true that they went up and they've developed beyond Moore's law, in fact, in some ways. But, but none in a radically different format than even a transistor switch or a vacuum tube switch, right?

• 33:26Speaker 01

  Right, but you're right. With quantum computing, it's such a different paradigm that I think we haven't fully grasped even the philosophical implications. And I know you've interviewed David Deutsch, right? Who, you know, he modified, so John Wheeler is sort of my favorite physicist of that 20th century because of all the thought experiments he did. But, you know, he coined this phrase, it from bit, towards the end of his life. And he said that anything that looks like a physical object is actually, the particle really is just an answer to a series of yes, no questions, which is a series of bits. And then Deutsch modified that statement to say it from qubit, right? So if you think of particles as bits, then, you know, the qubit is the next kind of logical way

• 34:08Speaker 01

  of being able to represent the idea that a particle can be in superposition. Now, if we didn't have superposition, then we wouldn't need quantum computers. We could just do a simulation off of classical computing and classical physics models. And you have a physics engine that runs on math. But, you know, supposedly, quantum computers can solve problems which grow exponentially. We've talked about cryptography, you know, a few years ago, I wrote an article. Just for fun, because I was exploring quantum computing, I said, this was back in 2017, I said, how I cornered the Bitcoin mining market using a quantum computer. And of course, back then, the quantum computers, the only ones that were out were like D-Wave, maybe IBM had a prototype at that point in time. And it was more a way to just explore

• 34:48Speaker 01

  this idea that could we explore all, the way Bitcoin mining works is, you know, you have this thing called a nonce, which is a random number that gets added to some bits, and you're trying to basically find a number that will make the whole thing hash to a small number that's lower than a difficulty threshold, and it gets more and more difficult over time. And today, we effectively have mining pools for Bitcoin that are basically, you know, parallel, thousands of computers doing parallel processing, trying to find the right answer. And so, you know, Deutsch has stated that he thinks the reason cryptography could be solved, when it would require, you know, more, more computations than the part of, than there are particles in the physical universe is because of the multiverse idea. He thinks maybe we're

• 35:33Speaker 01

  going out and exploring these different paths, and then finding the right answer. And I think, in the end, that may be where quantum computing becomes useful, is when you want to explore multiple paths simultaneously. And in the case of some of these problems, as they grow exponentially, I mean, it would literally take a classical computer thousands of years. And I hear the objection sometimes that we can't be in a simulation because it would take too much time or too much computing power to simulate all of these particles. It's the same kind of thing. So I, I think right now, it's more at a conceptual level, that quantum computing could be a way in which we could simulate the superposition of particles. But that said, if we're inside the simulation, it's very hard to speculate what's outside the simulation. We

• 36:17Speaker 01

  can speculate, but it's very hard to say for sure. It would be like Mario trying to, you know, talk about physical, you know, quantum superposition outside of the game. It would just be difficult to do. But it is an interesting topic to speculate on. And then that's why I went deep in.

• 36:31Brian Keating?

  And I want to turn to that, because I think it's a fascinating kind of a topic that you explore in the book. Before we get to, you know, the, this concept of ways you could prove it wrong, let's at least do what you're not supposed to do, which is to judge a book by its covers.

• 36:55Brian Keating?

  Tell us, please, the title, origin of the title, the subtitle and this cover illustration here.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Well, so, you know, as you mentioned, this is a second edition, but the title, the simulation hypothesis, is terminology that really comes from Nick Bostrom, who popularized this idea that we could be in a simulation in his 2003 paper, Are We, Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? That said, he meant it to apply to only one of three possibilities, of which the third possibility is you are most likely in a simulation. But I think that the terminology has grown beyond Bostrom's original idea, which was based on ancestor simulations. And you have folks like David Chalmers, who tried to coin the term the matrix hypothesis in the same year, 2003. And I think, you know, Chalmers has been on your podcast, I've interviewed him, he spoke at my class on simulation theory. But so I think the simulation hypothesis has become the catch-all term

• 37:45Speaker 01

  for this idea that we are in a virtual reality. Now, it's a very long subtitle. Normally publishers would not let you have such a long subtitle, but they let me because the first edition of the book had it. And it says, "An MIT computer scientist shows why AI, quantum physics and eastern mystics all agree we are in a video game." And remember, when I first wrote the book, ChatGPT wasn't even around, it was 2019. So this is why I've done the new edition, which has about 100 pages of new content. But I was more predicting where I thought AI would go, and it's moved even faster in that direction. Now, it's interesting, the cover, they gave me some cover ideas that I didn't like originally. It was just a bunch of geometrical shapes. And so I had them go back and then they actually used AI to help generate this particular cover, which I love, because it shows a person in a world that looks physical,

• 38:30Speaker 01

  but is in fact a virtual world. You can see the polygons, and that's how we build the video games. Although now with AI, you can see the polygons on the guy there, for example. I never noticed until you told me. Yeah, and that's how, in a video game, if you've seen it without, like, if you see how it's being constructed, there are these meshes that are like based on polygons, triangles, number of triangles, and then you put the texture or the skin on top of it. So this represents that idea.

• 38:55Brian Keating?

  That's great. Now, let's keep that next to the monolith. There we go. Back where it belongs, next to the monolith. Okay, so you mentioned that I'd love to talk about some more of the physical limitations. So one of the physical limitations that you talk about in the book is that space and time may be pixelated or voxulated. So a volume analog of a pixel, a two dimensional object, is a three dimensional object called a voxel or a volume element. And you make the case that the plank length is sort of reminiscent, or perhaps representative of such a thing. And it's not exactly clear to me that that's the case. So I'll just walk through my argument and then you can kind of contradict that or prove me wrong if you like. But the point that the smallest amount of space is related to this fundamental constants

• 39:40Brian Keating?

  of nature, just three of them, the gravitational constant, Planck's constant, h bar or h, and the speed of light, which is definitely a fundamental constant as we understand it. Although we'll ask the question later on, I want to ask you, why is the speed of light so slow, at least if the simulation is as big as we think it is? But let's get back to this Planck's constant and the accoutrements that turn it into a length. So a different square, you go through the square root of h c over g, something that has dimensions of length. And you make the case that that must be the smallest element of length. But I want to push back again with love and respect and gratitude for what you do. But there's something called the plank mass. So the plank length is ten minus 35 meters. So incomprehensibly small, it's less than the time it would take light to travel the

• 40:21Brian Keating?

  distance of an electron or something, or that speed, basically. And so it's incomprehensibly small. And that led many people, including Elon Musk, who was on the podcast for about 20 minutes last year, to speculate that this is, that is the fundamental limit of everything in terms of the, plenty of room at the bottom, ends there, you can't go smaller than that. But there's something called the plank mass, which you can also get from the same combinations to the fifth power instead of the three halves power, whatever. It works out to be correct. And that mass is like 1 hundred thousandth of a gram or something like that. It's a huge mass. I mean, it's not, a grain of sand, basically, is the plank mass. So what if you said, you're someone who's fixated on weight loss or something like that?

• 41:03Brian Keating?

  You can never lose more than a quanta of the Planck mass because that's the that is of mass. That's the only mass you get from the combinations of length, energy, frequency, time and gravitational constant. That would be preposterous, obviously. You can, you know, we weigh way more than that and we can measure things in my lab that's a thousand times smaller than that with with ease. So I want to ask you, why, why is there so much emphasis on things like the Planck length? And when it's so refutable that there's nothing fundamental about it. It is a consequence of just an arrangement of numbers, but there's nothing, absolutely nothing in physics says you can't speculate on things smaller than it, thousands of times smaller than it perhaps, or infinitely smaller if it is truly zero dimensional existing points.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I will say, you know, I rely on the physicist's interpretation of this. But my understanding is that we we can easily speculate half a Planck length, right? You can, you can put that in, you know, Planck length divided by two or divided by 10.

• 41:55Brian Keating?

  Right, yeah.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  It's just a numerical calculation, but that we can't measure anything smaller than that that amount. And so for me, you know, if you think of, again, I'm coming at it from a computer science point of view. If you think of a rendering of a screen, you have pixels and inside you you can basically have, you can calculate this thing is moving from left to right and it's moving sort of half a pixel. But you can't render it at that point. So you wait until it gets to the next pixel level and then you render it. And so for me, it's acting like a pixel. And so the question that I'm asking is, is space quantized? Quantum mechanics leads us to believe that energy is quantized and that particles exist in quantum states.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  So they're discrete states. So is is space quantized? And is time quantized? And I think the second one is is is an interesting question that we don't have an answer for yet. I mean, in fact, I was on stage with Avi Loeb, a major friend of ours back in Boston. And he and he says, well, I have a paper proving that, you know, time isn't quantized. Uh, and that's an interesting point, but I think there are other physicists who are telling me time may be quantized. And so we don't know if there's a smallest unit of time. I mean, there's, you can calculate the Planck time as being the amount of time it takes for the speed of light to get, you know, that small. Distance, but can we measure less than that? And if we can't, that might be another clue that we are basically in a frame type like in a video.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  You have frames, 30 frames per second, that there is some level of discretization. And I think that's where, you know, the work of people like Stephen Wolfram, Bradkin, who I mentioned other earlier, and others, looking at the universe as a set of discrete computations, is an interesting model. So I like to ask that question. Is space quantized? Is time quantized? And do you think deja vu is a consequence of the existence of the simulation? It certainly could be. And so, you know, one of my favorite science fiction authors is Philip K. Dick, and I interviewed his wife, Tessa, while I was writing this book. And she encouraged me to look at a speech he gave in Metz, France in 1977. And there's a famous line from that where he says, we are living in a computer programmed reality. And then it pans to the audience and you see people like, what are you talking about?

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Remember, this is like the Apple one. Fifty two years ago. Had come out, right? I mean, nobody had a personal computer at that point. And he's talking about a computer programmed reality. So his wife encouraged me to go back and watch the whole speech. And if you watch the whole speech, what he says is that the only clue we have is when some variable is changed, some alteration occurs in our reality. And he said, it would be as if we were reliving the same events. We were saying the same things. We would have a sense of deja vu. So he called deja vu a basic clue. Like in the in the Matrix, there's a famous scene where the cat is walking across the door and Neo looks at it and then suddenly he looks and it's the exact same cat and he experienced deja vu. But it is possible in a multiverse interpretation.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  One of the things that stuck with me after I started writing about simulation theory was if you can run one simulation, you could certainly run more than one. And it's very possible that we are in one branch of that simulated run and that this has already been done, but now variables have been changed. And that is one possible explanation for deja vu. I mean, I've heard Michio Kaku and others speculate that it could be from a parallel universe, but in a simulated environment, what a parallel universe means is just another run of the simulation with slightly different parameters. Do you think deja vu might be a consequence of us living in the simulation? I got you.

• 45:32Brian Keating?

  Just joking.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Perfect demonstration.

• 45:34Brian Keating?

  That'll be good. People listening on.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Could it be a glitch?

• 45:38Brian Keating?

  Let's keep going. The rest of the podcast is nothing but Brian asking Riz the same exact question.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Question is, would I change my answer a little bit?

• 45:45Brian Keating?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Each time.

• 45:46Brian Keating?

  Maybe the future retrocausal Riz is now interacting with us. Let's talk about the ethics of of the simulation. I've often talked about, well, let's say we can simulate with perfect fidelity our ancestors. Let's say we could do that. I've often wondered if that is true, then why are there so many Kardashians? But that's not for today. We're not going to talk about that today. But the point is, you know, let's say we could make a perfectly, you know, perfect Farmville. You know, everyone's in there and they're they're basically thinking that that this is great and that they're actually existing and they they they have a sense that we exist. And maybe it's, you know, kind of tangential. Maybe they don't have concrete evidence, but we're talking to them, we're communicating with them. And then we suddenly, you know, here at the University of California, we're having a lot of budget cuts. And and, you know, Trump administration has cut a lot of the scientific grants that we have.

• 46:30Brian Keating?

  So I have to I have to turn off my quantum computer. You know, like when I was a kid, I could afford the Commodore 64, but I couldn't record, I couldn't afford the tape drive. I was so poor, you know, I saved up all my money from working at the Venice Daily and Dobbs Ferry to buy a Commodore 64, and then I would just have to leave it on. So I program it. I wrote a copy of Aliza, which you talk about in the book. I wrote it, took me two days to write it. And then my brother came in and he was mad at me. Kevin was mad at me. And he switched it off, you know, so it erased everything. So what are the ethics of of this, you know, type of existence? We are responsible for these children simulations or, you know, kind of a in a in a non-matrix reality, we're just playing around with it. Do we have ethical and moral responsibilities? Obviously, I'm going to ask you if the simulator of the simulated hypothesis,

• 47:15Brian Keating?

  if he, she, it, they, them, or she, if they have a responsibility. But first, do we have a responsibility to say we make these high fidelity creations that seem to exist? Can we turn them off or cause them pain?

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Well, I think, you know, that's one of the ethical questions that comes up around the simulation hypothesis. And sometimes people say, well, because there's suffering in the world, therefore, we can't be in a simulation, because it would be unethical for the simulators, right, to do that to us. But, I mean, when we run simulations, why do we run simulations? We run to see what might happen under certain circumstances. If it's like a pandemic, for example, that we're simulating multiple times, or if it's, you know, a comet is going to impact the Earth. But in these simulations, there's no reason, in our video games, we actually do have characters, NPCs. And I like to make the distinction between the NPC version and the RPG version of simulation theory.

• 48:10Brian Keating?

  So please explain for the audience who might not be familiar, what's an NPC and what's an RPG?

• 48:13Speaker 01

  So NPC stands for non-playable or non-player characters. And those are the AI characters within the video game. So the term comes to us from Dungeons and Dragons, tabletop role-playing games. But, you know, if there's a bartender at an inn, or a guy selling you weapons, they're NPCs typically, because they're not controlled by you, the player and the character. And the RPG version is more, stands for role-playing game version. And in that case, the player exists outside of the game, and they have a character, what's called an avatar, which, incidentally, is a term that comes from Sanskrit. It originally meant when a divine figure comes down and squeezes themselves into a little body. And when the guys at Lucasfilm were making one of the first online role-playing games, multiplayer,

• 48:55Speaker 01

  not massively multiplayer, it was on a Commodore 64, it was called Habitat, they were looking for a term to describe this little 2D character on the screen, and they said it felt like they were pushing themselves down the phone lines into this small little character. And so they ended up borrowing this term from Sanskrit. And so the RPG version is closer to the Matrix version. In The Matrix, Neo Morpheus Trinity, they all existed outside of the simulation, but they had characters or avatars inside the simulation. And so I think you end up with different answers, depending upon where you fall. Now, Bostrom's logic tends to lean towards the NPC version, because everybody is basically AI, and you have lots and lots of those. In the RPG version, which is closer to like a virtual reality, we are the players, and we are the characters.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Characters and that that brings out, I think, a different kind of morality. But if you've ever seen the movie Free Guy that came out a couple of years ago, it was about an NPC inside the game who finds out he's an NPC. And the game is a little bit like Grand Theft Auto. So the players' characters are like abusing these NPCs, but then he realizes he's an NPC. And so I think it's an interesting question, but it doesn't negate just because they're suffering inside a world that we, as the creators of the world, or we as the people inside the simulation, you know, couldn't be in a simulation for that. In fact, that might be one of the reasons to have it a simulation is to be able to simulate suffering to figure out, you know, how we can reduce suffering in our world.

• 50:19Brian Keating?

  Yeah, that's a fascinating kind of consequence of that, how you might reveal, be revealed, or how we might reveal. I guess one question I want to turn back to our discussion of quantum mechanics. I've had recently Adam Becker wrote a wonderful book called What Is Real? He also has a techno dystopian version of kind of the abundant future that Andreessen and others have promulgated and Musk, et cetera. It was the main subject of our interview, but when we talk about reality, locality, Bell's inequalities and so forth, the questions of quantum mechanical interpretations come in. And you already mentioned one of them is the many worlds interpretation. Popularized by Hugh Everett, a student of John Wheeler. Also coined the term black hole. The guy is just a phenomenal intellect. One of the was Feynman's advisor at Princeton. The question of, you know, kind of computational compression

• 51:04Brian Keating?

  and irreducibility comes up when you think about this. And in your video game experience, you only, as I said before, you only render what you need. You don't have to render Nebraska when you're flying the Concorde, as I said, underneath the Eiffel Tower in Flight Simulator, you know. But to do that, there is an agent. And I don't think this is really covered quite so often. When you think about the simulation hypothesis as being economical, parsimonious, however you like, optimistic. You don't actually have to render everything, but you do have to know what you do have to render, you know, to kind of avoid the Truman Show, like lights falling out of the sky or whatever, which, you know, kind of reveals, it would reveal the game, so to speak. Although it's not clear that that, you know, couldn't happen or wouldn't happen. But but let's let's think about the practical.

• 51:47Brian Keating?

  Implications of it. So when you do the spawning of say, a new character in Minecraft or something like that, or you're rendering just around where that character is based on, you know, some physics engine trajectory of where they were previously. Farmville, you make the point, you know, they keep growing crops and stuff like that, but they're not growing crops, you know, that are completely inaccessible in some, you know, fifth dimension that you can't reach. It's, it's something related to your crops. I don't play Farmville, but, but I assume it's. So that is a measurement that has to be done. And as you know, when you do a measurement, you oftentimes in most interpretations of quantum mechanics, unless you do subscribe to the many worlds interpretation, you are enforcing an outcome. You know, you're not, you're not deciding the outcome, but you're deciding that the outcome happens. So for, for

• 52:31Brian Keating?

  example, if we are being observed, there is a quantum process that is going to destroy the coherence that we previously had in our wave functions and even in our entanglement. So how does that get avoided? And I mean, how, how do you avoid that fact that for every compression, there is an observation to allow you to notify you that you're allowed to do compression. So you're actually kind of destroying the coherence and collapsing the wave function automatically. How do you avoid that in the simulation?

• 52:58Speaker 01

  It's an interesting point. And I think, again, you know, we can look at it from this axis I mentioned earlier, the NPC versus RPG axis, because in the RPG version, there is an observer that exists outside of the simulation who is watching the screen or has on a virtual reality headset. Again, those are just metaphors. And maybe in, in the matrix, it was a BCI or a brain computer interface that was going in there. In the NPC version, the rendering depends on where you are in the simulation. And so, you know, one of the, the topics that I discussed a little bit is this idea of the delayed choice, double slit experiment, another experiment that Wheeler

• 53:38Brian Keating?

  Why don't you explain it for the audience, just in case they

• 53:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:41Brian Keating?

  might not be familiar with.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  So most people are familiar with Schrodinger's cat or, or the double slit experiment where the particle of light has to go through either one slit or the other, but it's in a state of superposition, which is that it's gone through both until the observation or the measurement is made. Now, what Wheeler said was, well, what if the Observation is made much later in the process and he described it using the cosmic delay choice experiment. I think that's the simplest way to describe it because people can understand. So if we have light coming from a quasar that's a billion light years away, it's going to take a billion years to get here. And if there's a very strong gravitational object like a black hole in the middle, then the light has to go to the left or to the right. And we can set up telescopes here to catch the polarization of the light. So basically, we can tell if it went left or right, kind of like some of the the lenses that you're building

• 54:26Speaker 01

  in your lab here for the polarization of light. Now, if that black hole is halfway between us and the quasar, then that decision would have had to have been made half a billion years ago. Right? So we're back in the age of the dinosaurs, or maybe even earlier. I don't know whether dinosaurs 500 million years ago.

• 54:41Brian Keating?

  Early single cells.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, we may need a paleontologist to tell us. But what the delayed choice experiment is saying is that, well, it's not until the measurement is made here on Earth that the decision of whether to go left or right is made. So it's in a state of superposition. And so is it possible that the past itself is in a state of superposition until the collapse happens? And that would mean that, you know, that decision, it's a kind of retro causality, if you will. And Schrodinger actually had a speech about this. I found this when I was looking around when I wrote my book, The Simulated Multiverse. He had an obscure speech from the 1940s where he said, not only are we, you know, choosing the state of the particle, but we are choosing from one of multiple

• 55:25Speaker 01

  simultaneous histories. And so, you know, he didn't go, he didn't write a lot about this. But if you think about that statement, it's kind of mind boggling, right? I mean, it's weird enough if the world is built on information. It's weird enough that it's quantized. It's weird enough that the probability way collapses. But if we are then choosing a past and filling it in. So with Farmville, for example, when you when you log in, you see what happened to your crops over the last 24 hours. Now, the computer is not necessarily sitting there and running, you know, every single second to see what had happened until it's needed. So it goes back to the past, and it says the probability of locusts or something happening, you know, to your crops is such and such. It calculates and it fills that in for you.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  So it's possible that there are these multiple collapses going on. And again, I'm relying on the physicist here, you know, with these interpretations.

• 56:16Brian Keating?

  That's your first mistake is relying on physicists.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  And they don't always agree, right?

• 56:21Brian Keating?

  Exactly right. There's violent battles over interpretations of, which is interesting because we don't have like battles about the interpretation of classical mechanics or electromagnetism, even though electromagnetism has features in it that are completely literally unreal because they involve complex numbers and certain factors that we can't account for unless we make the concession that what we can observe is only a real number, which is something akin to enforcing the observation. Once you collapse the wave, not the wave function, but the wave. Let's talk about how we could detect where we are. I mean, this is something you must have thought about. You do discuss it actually. How could we discern the existence, first of all, and then the purpose, second of all? So let's start with existence. Could we look for glitches? Are there possibly glitches in the matrix?

• 57:06Brian Keating?

  Yeah, my friend Tom Bilyeu, who you should meet in LA. He talks about, you know, the matrix was a documentary. It wasn't a real, so, but, but if that's true, we should be able to see, you know, the woman in the red dress, her eyes are getting, or she gets some wrinkles now after 25 years. So tell us what, what sorts of, of, of cracks in the matrix? What sorts of diagonal? I like to say that I know how the matrix ends. We diagonalize it using UL decomposition. That's a super nerd linear algebra joke. I'm sorry, sorry, Riz. You're getting all my dad jokes at once. But tell me, are there more plausible scenarios that you've encountered where we could get a glimpse into the existence of the matrix through glitches and fragments of it?

• 57:43Speaker 01

  You know, people often ask, you know, is there a way to prove we're in a simulation? And this ties to, you know, another question I know that you have, which is, is it, is it non falsifiable? I mean, is it impossible to prove that we're not in a simulation? And if the simulation is perfect, then it might be very difficult to prove. But just because you can't prove something is not true, doesn't mean you can't find evidence that it is true. Like, I mean, for example, we could say there are no asteroids anywhere in the universe. Well, we can't really prove that, but we can certainly find asteroids. And if we find them.

• 58:15Brian Keating?

  You're getting one. Here's a fragment of an asteroid. This is a real life meteorite.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  Oh, that's great.

• 58:19Brian Keating?

  A fragment of an early asteroid, older than the Earth itself, maybe interstellar. We don't know.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  Where did this fall?

• 58:23Brian Keating?

  Uh, this fell in Argentina and you too can get one out there. Not only will you get one guaranteed if you are like Riz and you have a .edu email address. BrianKeating.com/edu guaranteed to win one in the USA. But you'll get one, uh, by chance, perhaps if you go to BrianKeating.com/YT. And those are ways to win it and you'll get all the information about them, where it fell, how you can collect your own, where you can see, when you can see them, what you need to see them and what kind of telescopes, monoculars, et cetera, you can use. So that's another gift for you to come here, but it is a fragment, an artifact and, and what do they call the NFT from the early, early universe, at least the early solar system. So anyway, so asteroids, you were saying, yeah.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So I put it on the picture of Arthur C. Clarke here. So that's appropriate.

• 59:02Brian Keating?

  Rama. Rendezvous, he's rendezvousing right now.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  It's true. In fact, you know, I was telling Avi Loeb that if you look at the estimated size of a Mu Mu, it was almost exactly.

• 59:11Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  The estimated size of Rama from rendezvous Rama. But we were getting into ways we might look for evidence. Uh, and so I think, you know, one of the ways we might look for evidence is this idea of looking for computational processes in nature. And, uh, you know, I think you've had Jim Gates on your, your podcast who talks about finding basically error correction codes in the equations of string theory. And, you know, error correction codes are basically another way of compressing data in a sense. For people who don't know, if you have like, say a string of, you know, eight ones in a row, you can add a couple of bits to that to say there are eight of these. And that's how you can tell the integrity. But we also say that there isn't much information entropy in that string of bits, because they're all ones. If you start changing them.

• 59:56Brian Keating?

  Surprise in them, right?

• 59:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's no surprise in them. Then you get more information entropy and they can have many different possible meanings as well. So we can look for evidence of computation in nature. We can also look for geometrical structures, uh, that might imply that the physical universe, you know, has even pixels. Depending on what type of, if you're inside a computer screen, again, really simple example, you can look at sort of the, the number of pixels this way versus that way. And, and how do things flow differently? So that's another way. Then there are, you know, physical glitches you can look for. And then there's a whole host of paranormal phenomena that could be considered glitches. And most scientists don't buy that. But again, I don't always agree simply because if you're in a court and one side can always dismiss

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  the other side's evidence, then of course you're always going to say, well, evidence doesn't exist because you can just say, I don't take that evidence. But people see, you know, people see ghosts, which to me, if you, if you really listen to people's observations, you see sometimes it looks like it's replaying the same scene over and over again.

• 1:00:58Brian Keating?

  We have to be careful of confirmation bias too. If we're looking to have excuses to believe that the simulation or ghosts or your dead loved one who you love so much can be resuscitated even digitally or artifactually, you know, we have to be careful.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  It could be, but, but my point was, okay, whether you, let's assume for a minute that people are actually seeing things and then say, well, is there a way that, well, how could that be explained? And it's pretty easy in a simulation, you have memory that sits there. We have a, we have something called garbage collection in computer science where we leave values in memory and we only clean them up because it's too much work to clean everything up only when we need to. And so you could have glitches from the past, which are just, the, the code is just replaying the scene again and again until it's, it's cleaned up. And so you could look for these types of weird glitches as well. And then, you know, there are people who think maybe you can overwhelm the simulation, right?

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  So there's a whole, there was a movie called the Mandela Effect.

• 1:01:57Brian Keating?

  Yeah. What is the Mandela Effect?

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  So the Mandela Effect is this idea that a group of people remember history differently than it actually happened, at least as we know in this timeline. And it was named after Nelson Mandela, where many people remember him dying in prison in the 1980s. But of course he didn't die in prison. He got out, president of South Africa, Nobel Prize winner. But it turns out there are lots of these little effects where a subgroup of people remember something happening that. The majority don't remember. And so I use that as a starting point to explain this idea that if you run a simulation multiple times, it's possible that some people are remembering, either because they've retained things in memory, or because they are players who've

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  played it more than once, but don't remember. And, you know, we go back to science fiction now. Philip K. Dick, in that speech, if you read the rest of that speech, he said, "You would need to find a group of people who remember an alternate past." And, you know, he wrote his book, The Man in the High Castle.

• 1:02:55Brian Keating?

  Right, about the alternate history of World War II.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  About the alternate history. And he came to believe that that was a real history that was rewound. And so I think that that's an interesting way to think about the past. But then there are things like the Tiananmen Square.

• 1:03:08Brian Keating?

  Woodstock, Mandela, if they say that, the three times many people think they were at Woodstock, then actually were there.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  Oh, that's interesting. I haven't heard that one. But with the Tiananmen Square, it was, did the tank run over?

• 1:03:17Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  You know, the guy in front of the tank.

• 1:03:20Brian Keating?

  Which were the brain fills and gaps, right? Garbage collects, as you're saying.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it could be that, but what it could be, if somebody has more proximity to that event, like, for example, if they're ardent followers of the Reverend Billy Graham, and they remember his funeral, and they remember, you know, people speaking at his funeral, they're more likely to have that memory be correct than someone like me. I couldn't tell you the difference between when Billy Graham died versus Martin Luther, well, obviously he died later than Martin Luther King, but in general, I couldn't tell you from one reverend or another when they died. And so the question is, are there people who remember that? But, but again, whether you believe in it or not, it's an interesting way to think about this idea that simulations run again and again with different variables could result in these types of glitches.

• 1:04:06Brian Keating?

  And frequently, we do it for a purpose, right? I'm a pilot. I fly a little, you know, planes around the Southern California airspace. And we have to go into simulators, you know, once every year or two to get, to get up to speed. And it's much safer and more cost effective to do that than to go out and do it. So there's tangible benefits to running those simulations, to me. My insurance, you know, might require it, et cetera, and so forth. We simulate weather. We look at, you know, what's going to be the impact of a drought or a fire season on crops in California, whatever. But what is the purpose of the simulation if it indeed exists as you claim it does? You claim the proponents of the evidence.

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  It's more likely than not.

• 1:04:40Brian Keating?

  More likely than not, but it could be fifty one percent as you well, you've updated your problem. Let's skip that for now, but let's just go to your to to what would be some of the purposes of it? What would be the analog of my insurance company?

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  Well, so when people ask me that, I like to ask two questions. The first is why do we run simulations? And the second is why do we play video games? And the first is what I think we were just alluding to with this idea that you can, when you run a simulation, you want to find out what is the most likely outcome. But you also want to figure out what is the most favorable outcome. And so you'll go back and you'll change variables and you'll keep running it until you get to that most favorable outcome. And then you try to steer things in that direction. Perhaps, you know, the timeline where the Nazis and the Japanese won World War Two was did not lead to the best outcome. And so the simulators decided to rewind that and we were just on another branch. And this branch may only last so long, whereas at some point in the future, people may collapse the probability wave

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  and find a different simultaneous history than we have today. But so for simulations, there's a civilizational level answer to that question, which I think is this idea of the best outcomes, the most likely outcomes. Will we get to the point where we leave the planet? Could it be that we're trying to see if we're able to build other simulations? There's another simulation film from the year nineteen ninety nine that came out sixty days after The Matrix called The Thirteenth Floor.

• 1:06:02Brian Keating?

  All right.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Now, it didn't get much attention because The Matrix was such a big cultural phenomenon. But in that, I'll give away the punchline.

• 1:06:09Brian Keating?

  Yeah, it's been twenty five years.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  It's been twenty five years. So they're in ninety nine and they build an ancestor simulation, what Bostrom would come to call an ancestor simulation of nineteen thirty seven, Los Angeles. And then later they find out that they are actually nineteen ninety nine is actually a simulation from the year twenty twenty four. So very recently. And what the people that come in from the outside or from the future, in that case, you know, depending on how you look at base reality, say is that we made thousands of simulations and you're the only one that ran your own simulation, but you're using too much computing power. So we're going to shut you down. Could be these great filter type purposes of that. It could also be that there are multiple civilizations being incubated in different planets. And the whole point of simulation is to see when when we meet and to try to simulate everything before that,

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  to see what might happen. Now, going to the RPG version, why do we play video games? Well, mostly to have some kind of fun, right? But we also try to have experiences that we can't have outside the simulation. And so this is where I'm not necessarily in agreement with Bostrom or others that if we're in a simulation, it has to be an ancestor simulation, or that the rules outside the simulation have to resemble the rules inside the simulation. So I can get into a game, like a Lord of the Rings game, and I can maybe, you know, get on a dragon and fire arrows or and and and shoot orcs. And that's not something I can do outside. So there are experiences that I might want to have as a player that I can have in the character. Now, the nature of our world is is pretty dark in many cases.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  There's a lot of suffering, getting back to the ethical questions, et cetera. But, you know, I think that ties more to the idea of a soul basically coming into a body to have a human experience, which might include suffering. Because perhaps there isn't as much suffering outside the simulation, and that's why we do it inside the simulation. So I think, you know, there may be individual reasons where each of us have our own experiences. So if we're in the RPG side, we might have a storyline. So if you had asked me in high school what I was going to do with my life, or if you'd asked you, you'd probably have an, you know, an answer that at least anticipated, in your case, becoming a physicist. In my case, I would have said I'm going to be a software entrepreneur entrepreneur, and then I'm going to become a writer. And I thought that would happen at the, when I was the ripe old age of 28,

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  is when I would make the transition, because, you know, I was in high school.

• 1:08:26Brian Keating?

  Go back to school, get a PhD.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, now I went back to get a PhD later. So it's interesting, but I think we have, we may have individual storylines. And of course, now we're in the metaphysical realm. So there could be a teleological purpose to the simulation. That, you know, you may have fine tuning as a way of clipping the branches. It's possible that the multiverse idea holds with multiple simulations, but it's not infinite. So, you know, one of the big objections is this is not a parsimonious interpretation. Because you're creating, you're literally creating a universe, right? Every, not every second, but every so often. But if you're pruning the branches, because they wouldn't lead you down where you want to go, then you have this direction to the simulation that it's possible we could be in something like that. I mean, at best, we can speculate, just like video game characters can speculate.

• 1:09:11Brian Keating?

  So before I ask you the final, you know, kind of hard question about, you know, the simulation crashing, what's your next project? What's your next big, big event, big simulation run for you in this branch of the multiverse?

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  In terms of simulation theory, I wanted to go deeper on two aspects that I explore in this book. And one of the aspects is the religious aspect. And so I want to go deeper on the religious scriptures and, and ask the question, what if at least the things that they have in common are, are real phenomenon? And there is more to the physical world than what we can see or even we can observe with our science? And really draw parallels as a way, not just to connect science and religion, because I feel like these two have been growing further and further apart, but as a way to connect individuals of different faiths together. Because there are many similarities.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  And for a newer generation, this metaphor of the video game is as good as the metaphors of the soul, putting on the body, like a pair of clothes, which is in the Bhagavad Gita. It's in the Sufi mystical traditions. It becomes a new way to think about the, if you've ever watched the show Battlestar Galactica, they have these AI characters called the Cylon, who are oddly enough, you know, kind of religious fanatics. But they say, you know, one of them asks, what is the most basic article of faith? And the answer is that this is not all there is. And so I want to explore that in a little more detail. And then on the other side, I want to explore this idea of digital physics and computation in more detail, including the history of some of the, the players in this revolutionary way of thinking about the physical world as information.

• 1:10:46Brian Keating?

  Last question, is all a game? If it's all a simulation, what's the winning strategy? How should we conduct ourselves?

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  Well, I think if you play a game, you may want to think about how you evaluate the game after you play. And so some people think there's Nothing after death. Some people think that there is something after death. I take the near death experience reports more seriously about life reviews because they end up seeing things that they could not have known. And so this idea that we may have to go back and review everything we did and how we treated other people from their point of view, I think should lead us to be more compassionate with others and to think about how we treat other people inside the game. Basically, you know, a woman once said to me, I think my husband is

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  an NPC. And I say, no, that's probably not a healthy way to approach this. I think, you know, viewing everybody else as a player and that how you treat them is actually a part of your challenge. Video games consist of quests and achievements. Part of the quest here is, do you abuse people or do you treat them well? And also, I think we're all drawn to certain professions, vocations, places. We all have different skills and strengths, you know, just like in Dungeons and Dragons, we would roll the dice and you would have, you know, so much charisma, so much strength, you know. I didn't roll to be a basketball player, even though-

• 1:12:09Brian Keating?

  You roll for the Riz. You got the Riz.

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  Exactly. So I think, I think we lean into the things that we're drawn to, and that's how we play the game, is to do the things that we were meant to do, that our character was set up to do in this life.

• 1:12:21Brian Keating?

  Dr. Rizwan Burke, thank you so much for making the trek down here to San Diego. I hope we do it again for your next book and even for your previous book on the simulated multiverse. So much to talk about, so much cool technology and developments in the video game world and the AI world and the startup world. It's just an exciting time to be alive. I just love playing the game. I hope I can play it even beyond the biblical age of 120. Thank you, Riz. Thank you so much for coming down.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me here.

• 1:12:46Brian Keating?

  If you enjoyed this interview with Rizwan Burke, I know you're gonna love my conversation with the master of the simulation hypothesis himself, Dr. Nick Bostrom. Click here for that video and don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe.